I have this mantra in my presentations about payments.  Payments is being attacked by Fintech startups like Klarna, Square, Stripe, Alipay, PayPal (Venmo, Braintree) and more.  In fact, according to VentureScanner, it’s the second most active area for investors after lending (

 CSR plc (LSE: CSR; NASDAQ: CSRE) today announced that itsCSR1013™ technology has been used by BrilliantTS, a leading manufacturer of smart hardware and software solutions, to create a multi-payment card. This enables simple and secure credit and debit card payments by connecting to a smartphone using Bluetooth®.

BPC Banking Technologies, the leading provider of Open System payment solutions, together with Palestine Monetary Authority (PMA) announces the launch of the National Switch of Palestine. The National Switch, based on SmartVista, is considered a cornerstone for the Electronic Retail Payments in Palestine.

Misys, the global application software and services company, has been awarded “Best buy-side pricing and market display” for its FusionInvest solution at the Systems in the City Awards. Misys FusionInvest was recognised for its ability to enable investment firms to price a wide range of asset classes accurately across listed, OTC derivatives and structured products.

OpenMAMA, the project developed to allow financial services firms to move more freely between market data technology and content vendors, today announces its re-launch boasting a new advisory group, increased vendor coverage and, for the first time, the ability to bridge data to and from Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform (TREP) using a completely open source stack.

Adyen, a leading global payments technology company, today announced an expansion of its existing partnership with Uber – powering payments for the ride-hailing company’s users in Casablanca, Morocco. Uber, now live in 58 countries, teamed up with Adyen to enable local users in Morocco to pay with locally issued credit and debit cards.

A global study of over 300 banking and financial services executives shows that, for the first time, innovation is ranked as important as regulation. The research also reveals that mobile first has now become mainstream, while innovative disruptive technologies such as block-chain will potentially become a very attractive alternative to traditional payment methods, transforming payment processing and acting as significant drivers for change this year.

Overwhelmingly rapid change has become the new normal in regulatory compliance worldwide, including Mauritius. Form, content, format and calculation are being constantly changed by regulators to drive a stable financial ecosystem. Post the 2008 global crisis, regulators worldwide have begun adopting global standards for automating information exchange with banks and also to ensure that the banking ecosystem speaks a common language. Meanwhile the Bank of Mauritius (BOM) requires over 70 returns that Mauritian banks need to automate.